The Power of Progressive Web Apps

Native apps vs Progressive web apps

Progressive web apps are the future. They lose the friction of loading, searching, downloading and waiting. Progressive web apps are easy to download to your home screen from the scan of a QR Code or click of a URL, which means making the user experience fast and easy. Native apps can lose customers through the long-winded steps of downloading.

Native apps can do things such as work offline, load on the home screen and send push notifications. Whereas web apps haven’t been able to do that till now, introducing progressive web apps. These apps are now giving the app-like experience on the web apps. So now progressive web apps can power offline, update content and send push notifications.

What is Responsive web design (RWD)?

This is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes.

Responsive web design also considers the viewer proximity as part of the viewing context as an extension for RWD.

Content, design and performance are necessary across all devices to ensure usability and satisfaction.

Fluid Grids, uses relative sizing to fit the content to the device’s screen size. Responsive design moves away from the pixel-based approach because a pixel on one device could be eight pixels on another device.

By basing text size, widths, and margins on percentages, a fixed size can be turned into a size relative to its display space.

Media queries, also known as breakpoints, can be used to apply different styles based on the capabilities of the device.

The website detects the type of device you’re using or the size of your web browser and correctly displays the page.

Flexible images and media allows the web browser will make the image shrink and expand depending on its container.

What are progressive web apps?

Progressive web apps behave more like native apps. The key features are:

Being able to work offline and sending push notifications to appear on your device like a native app would. This currently is working on Android phones and Apple is working to make this possible for their products. Another great feature is that they can be updated directly without having to submit on several app stores.

They can do things such as accessing your camera/webcam and location services and associate with native apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, of course only once it has asked for your permission.

Downloading progressive web apps is far simpler and easier than downloading native apps, with minimal prompted steps to follow. Also adds an icon, so it appears to look like a native app on the home screen.